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Keeping Your Customer Pipeline Full

The economic recovery seems to be in full swing and the customers are coming back. This is good news! You may have just about as much work as you can handle these days. Or perhaps you do some of the time, and then make a marketing surge to fill the pipeline when things are slack.

But that’s the problem, right? When you’re really busy you don’t have time to market. And when you’re not busy enough it’s because you weren’t marketing during the boom weeks. The fact is that you need to market continually (boom times and lean times) in order to keep your sales pipeline full.

So how do you do that?

• Always be thinking about marketing your business and attracting new customers. It should be top of mind all the time. Don’t skip networking events. Don’t slack off on continually getting your name in front of current and potential customers. You can’t afford it!

• Reach out to former customers and try to get them to come back. Use social media, email newsletters and other forms of communication to keep in touch with them and invite them to reconnect with you.

• Create a system to put customers on a waiting list if they come to you when you’re too busy to handle them. Don’t let them slip away because they won’t come back.

• Consider getting additional help to handle overflow times. That way you can meet a customer’s need when the need is there. If you put a customer off because you’re too busy, they’ll just go somewhere else instead.

• Think about creating tiered pricing so that you can adjust your prices up or down depending on what your demand is at the moment. This is a strategy to adjust as you go so that you always have customers coming in.

• Ask yourself if you can turn some of your customers into a recurring and predictable income stream, and away from a one-off occasional buyer. The more “bread and butter” customers you have, the easier it will be to smooth out your pipeline and forecast workflow and resource needs.

Marcia Bagnall is director of the Chemeketa Small Business Development Center and instructor of Small Business Management Program. The Small-Business Adviser column is produced by the center and appears each Sunday. Questions can be submitted to SBDC@chemeketa.edu. Visit the SBDC at 626 High St. NE in downtown Salem or call (503) 399-5088.